Imagine your eventual death….what feelings run through you? Mortician Caitlin Doughty hopes some level of peace and acceptance accompanies the sadness and the anxiety. As a child, watching another child fall to her death in a Hawaiian shopping mall, Doughty began her path as a death expert and funeral director. Doughty didn’t agree with the commercial death industry for several reasons, including the potential to up-sell to grieving families, its unnecessary procedures (embalming and its environmental impact), and its dynamic of removing corpses from the view of society (which only elevates our death anxiety). Therefore, she decided the best way to educate society was to go from the inside: enroll in mortuary school. Doughty has since been busy working at her non-profit L.A. funeral home, blogging at her website The Order of the Good Death, and creating an “Ask a Mortician” podcast and video series all in the name of making our culture more death positive. This book is fascinating, creepy, humorous, and well-written. Doughty is a great storyteller: irreverent, witty, smart, and has found her calling. Doughty is very descriptive and leaves nothing to the imagination when it comes to dead bodies, decomposition, and funeral home procedures. Educational and engaging, this work is highly recommended! She also has recently written a book called From Here to Eternity which is another page-turner about worldwide death customs.

As we get ready to start a new semester, please take a look at all the ways the library can support you and can help your students achieve success! Check out our Faculty Services menu, which lists descriptions of our services (face-to face or online), and provides online forms for your convenience.

If you have questions, please email libref@elgin.edu or call 847-214-7354 to speak with a librarian about how we can best assist you.

Happy New Year! Here’s a reminder if you haven’t yet activated your digital subscription to the New York Times:

The library has a subscription to the New York Times digital edition. This is the web version of the New York Times, rather than a database version. It includes full access to all articles dating back to 1851 right from a mobile device or a computer. You can register to have free, personal access through this new subscription. Here are the steps:

Using a student.elgin.edu or elgin.edu email account, create a personal account for full access to NYT from 1851-present.

Account registration works best in a Chrome browser.

You only need to register at this link once. After that, you can go directly to nytimes.com and login with your personal account.

Access to the New York Times in text form for student research is still available through the library’s newspaper databases.